1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to web pages and more particularly relates to improving load times for web pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has emerged as the default platform for business and personal application development. The demand to build Internet applications of increasing usability has magnified the adoption of multimedia technology to represent a better user experience. The result is that a normal web page usually comprises a large number of image resources, executable scripts and style definitions. The file size of each of these resources is small, usually less than 1K. When these small resources are deployed on web servers, they typically have high overhead requirements, resulting in relatively high demands on network bandwidth and server workload.
The network overhead requirements of the resources include protocol headers, HTTP headers, TCP headers, and IP headers. The average HTTP header is more than 300 bytes for a single HTTP request or response, thus in one request/response interaction, there are more than 600 to 700 bytes HTTP of headers. As stated above, the size of objects in many web pages is already very small, so the unnecessary cost of HTTP headers is considerable. The smaller the object is, the larger the overhead ratio is. Since the headers contributing to the overhead requirements of each request are a fundamental part of the current structure of the Internet, little can be done to reduce them.
In addition to delays caused by overhead, when a web page is accessed by a browser, the browser sends a request for each object in the web page and waits for a response for each object. This creates another “round-trip time” delay that compounds the overhead delays caused by headers and the like. When a web page consists of many small objects, the wait times for the objects are cumulative and further delay loading.